


Unspoiled Land

by EighteenWheelsandADozenRoses



Category: The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Hopeful Ending, Mentioned Suicide Attempt, Parenthood, Post-Canon, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-21
Updated: 2020-11-21
Packaged: 2021-03-10 06:27:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,040
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27658814
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EighteenWheelsandADozenRoses/pseuds/EighteenWheelsandADozenRoses
Summary: Esther, after.
Comments: 8
Kudos: 19
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Unspoiled Land

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tossedwaves](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tossedwaves/gifts).



I go on, having left behind the hell of my deep freeze at last. Because I must, and because the needle driving my brain onward tells me that it’s time.

The lid is off and I am alive. 

I place a foot in every puddle, instead of watching the figs wither and molder over my head. Am I an editor? A poet? A reader? A dancer? Can I wear several shoes at once, I plunge my toe carelessly into them. I learn much and try to use it, this time. Teaching but also trying to learn. Sartre in Italy, and Dickens in Madrid. I write and make money from it, and I write because my soul will not still. 

I see so much more now. How it really is.

I glow with a strange vitality, like nuclear waste, I must signal my past and where I have been. I draw them to me like a fatal flame, boys and girls. They comb my hair and bruise my waist and leave pink bite marks all over my toes as if I’m the most expensive sugar cake. 

I want to sample every single one of them.

And so I rush through the continent like a sailor on his first leave. I climb upon planes and take out boats. The ocean cradles me in its womb as I float from land fat to land fat. I sample without guilt, and this time there is no blood, no pain, no fear. I give myself over biting and scratching, and in the morning sit out in the sun, letting it wash its healing light over me. 

I eat extravagantly, with as many people as I can bare to fit around the table. We worry about the bomb and the threat of war, and we suck olives from the tips of our fingers. We’re always looking for the next idea, the next big thing that will make us famous writers or bring us closer to the flickering halogen lamps of our God. Drugs, sex, food, alcohol, the arts. I want it all, and I want it immediately. It’s the American in me. I want it COD, American Expressed, like a box of cake mix or a bottle of Miss Clairol. 

###^^^^^^^^^^^####

Then I meet him, and the world stands still.

He’s impossibly tall and huge, but not a threat – more of a puppy dog. And brilliant, so brilliant that my heart aches whenever I look up at him. His dirty nails, his long black coat, his composition book filled with drawings and soon sketches of me in inky charcoal – ah, I am in heat, I am in lust, I am in love, I am in need.

We go to the best restaurants. We journey through pastures thigh-deep in mud and dance in our best shoes at the smartest of nightclubs. We consult Ouija boards and throw salt over our shoulders. Our horoscopes say we will remain a family. I move into his little apartment and type his articles for the _Times_ , and at night we eat strawberry cake in bed.

The wedding is something we both want and need, and something I plan with meticulous detail that would make the fanciest hotelier blush. We had a bottle of wine twice the size of our heads, and a beautiful big roast crackling with fat. We went on to live spartanly, disturbing my mother, who I haven’t truly seen in the last few years, to my relief.

(Does one ever want to hear their mother belch saccharine about how hard you have worked to “keep together” and become “a normal married woman”? How it was clearly a miracle that pulled you out of the sack and paste you back together thanks to the help of a beloved doctor, who stood in at the wedding party and tried not to roll her eyes at my mother’s bland, teary exclamations?)

We have lived like wild bohemians – I teaching and writing, he painting – until the rabbit passed on in a terrible accident. I am filled with fear – I flew to pieces for a moment – but then I solidify with determination. I am needed. I am a delivery system for the child’s existence, but more, but more. I produce as much as I can – canned peaches, a novel, twelve sketches of my husband lying nude upon our sofa with a look of sweet love on his face – before I surrender to my fear of the Buddy Willards of the world. Specimen jars and the burn of embalming fluid.

And yet, at home, she comes into the world and my arms, and it is much better. My daughter is born in the middle of a blizzard, her demeanor calm, pacific. The birds sing through the howl of the wind and it is life, not death, that greets her. She does not have the jittery, manic fear in her eyes that I’ve had in my own for the entirety of my pregnancy. She, I think, will be different. She’ll be able to put her hands upon something concrete, become a whole woman –touch something wild in the world and bring it to heel.

I feel the warm spring air wrap itself around me as she passes her sixth month and begins to crawl. For her, I carve apart the old sunglasses case from the magazine trip and let her play with it. For her, I take my typewriter out and we sit upon the porch of our little English townhouse. While we wait for her father to come home, I begin to write about it all. 

The summer, the Rosenberg’s execution, and Jay Cee. Ptomaine and my clothing tossed to the wind. My non-fatal swim through the ocean waves and my rebirth on the shores. The flashing of the lights behind my eyes as the pills emptied out near the bottom of the jar. The way I felt after the first shock. Insulin. Dr. Nolan. “Save it For my Funeral.” Irving and the blood. And finally, my wholeness.

The glass lid of the bell jar hovers off in the distance now. There seems to be miles between us. I don’t expect it will always stay off my neck, but I hope. 

Sometimes I do hope.


End file.
